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Paper short abstract

This paper aims to analyse the narrative function of the forest in Madreselva, a contemporary ecocritical fairy-tale by Gerardo Spirito. The use of forest imagery within a modern folkloric tale highlights the search for an anti-capitalist and mystical relationship with the environment in our time.

Paper long abstract

The paper aims to analyse the narrative function of the forest in Madreselva (published in 2025), a contemporary ecocritical fairy-tale narrative by Italian writer Gerardo Spirito. The adoption of folkloric imagery as a lens for an ecocritical perspective on human history underscores the enduring bond between the fairy tale and ecology, even in contemporary literature. Set in a village near a forest on a mountainside in Southern Italy, the tales of Madreselva evoke a raw, mystical, and cavernous reality. The characters, shepherds, wanderers, men of faith and of superstition, are present but not central. Rather, it is nature, and the forest in particular, that plays a crucial role in shaping an environment where the non-human element intertwines with collective human agency. The forest functions both as setting and as origin for agrarian and primordial cults: the rite of transhumance, the veneration of roots, hollow trees, mossy crusts, and visceral fat. It profoundly influences the life of the community. The paper focuses especially on the absence of boundaries between forest and civilization, and on the constant interchange and mutual influence between the two domains. From this analysis arise crucial questions concerning the recourse to a sacralised forest imagery as a way of narrating an anti-capitalist and mystical relationship with the environment in our times.